Fear of being envied makes people behave well toward others

Dec 03, 2010

It's nice to have success -- but it can also make you worry that the jealous people will try to bring you down. New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, has found that the fear of being the target of malicious envy makes people act more helpfully toward people who they think might be jealous of them.

In previous research, Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his colleagues Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters had figured out that envy actually comes in two flavors: benign envy and malicious envy. They studied people who showed these two kinds of envy and found that people with benign envy were motivated to improve themselves, to do better so they could be more like the person they envied. On the other hand, people with malicious envy wanted to bring the more successful person down. Van de Ven and his colleagues wondered what the experience was like for the people who are the target of the envy.

"In anthropology, they say if you are envied, you might act more socially afterward because you try to appease those envious people," van de Ven saysby sharing your big catch of fish, for example. They wanted to know if these observations from anthropology held up in the psychology lab.

In experiments, he and his colleagues made some people feel like they would be maliciously envied, by telling them they would receive an award of five eurossometimes deserved based on the score they were told they'd earned on a quiz, sometimes not. The researchers figured the deserved prize would lead to benign envy, while the undeserved prize would lead to malicious envy. Then the volunteer was asked to give time-consuming advice to a potentially envious person.

People who had reason to think they'd be the target of malicious envy were more likely to take the time to give advice than targets of benign envy.

In another experiment, an experimenter dropped a bunch of erasers as the volunteer was leaving; those who thought they'd be maliciously envied were more likely to help him pick them up.

"This sort of serves a useful group function," says van de Ven. We all think better off people should share with others, "but that's not something we are inclined to do when we are better off." This fear of envy can encourage us to behave in ways that improve the social interactions of the group.

Related Stories

People are willing to pay more for products that elicit their envy -- but that's only when they are motivated by a positive, benign form of envy, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

AMD revved up the performance of AMD Turion™ 64 mobile technology with the introduction of two new models, MT-40 and MT-37. These new additions to AMD’s popular 64-bit mobile processor family are expected to be available ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Greed has been blamed for most of Wall Street's woes and the banking sector's recent collapse, but two professors at Washington University in St. Louis say envy is really to blame. And, they warn, envy is ...

Recommended for you

People whose sexual identities changed toward same-sex attraction in early adulthood reported more symptoms of depression in a nationwide survey than those whose sexual orientations did not change or changed in the opposite ...

For chronically ill patients with major depression, an approach to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) that incorporates patients' religious beliefs is at least as effective as conventional CBT, suggests a study in the April ...

The Internet brings the world to our fingertips, but it turns out that getting information online also has a startling effect on our brains: We feel a lot smarter than we really are, according to a Yale-led study published ...

More midriff, cleavage and muscle is seen in MTV's popular television docusoaps such as The Real World, Jersey Shore or Laguna Beach than in the average American household. Semi-naked brawny Adonises and even more scantily ...

Many studies show that video gamers perform better than non-gamers on certain visual tasks, like managing distractors and identifying targets, but a small new Brown University study provides gamers with some ...

User comments : 3

Would this explain the animus against people who "act white" in school? For someone who studies ("deserving") they do not spread the wealth (cheatsheets?), thus incurring the wrath of those with malignant envy.